Pat Kirkwood was Britain’s first wartime star, a stage sensation whose legs were famously called the eighth wonder of the world. But the career that made her a household name was overtaken by a single night in October 1948, when Prince Philip, husband of the heavily pregnant Princess Elizabeth, came backstage to her dressing room and then spent the evening dancing with her through Mayfair until dawn. Kirkwood always insisted the evening was innocent, describing the prince as full of life and energy, and saying she suspected he felt trapped. But the public saw a scandal, and the rumor of an affair followed her for the rest of her life.
Born in 1921 in Pendleton, a working-class district of Salford, Kirkwood won a talent contest at 14 and quickly rose through the ranks of British theater. By 1939, at 18, she was a sensation in the review Black Velvet at the London Hippodrome, singing Cole Porter’s My Heart Belongs to Daddy during the first months of the war. She became known as Britain’s first wartime star, holding the stage at the London Palladium in 1940 as the bombs fell. In 1944, MGM and 20th Century Fox both offered her seven-year contracts reportedly worth £250,000, a sum worth well over £10 million today.
She chose MGM and sailed for Hollywood shortly after the war ended in Europe. The American venture collapsed. For the film No Leave, No Love in 1946, the studio judged her stage body wrong for the camera and pressured her to lose weight. She reportedly took thyroid and pituitary capsules, and her health gave way.
She suffered a nervous breakdown and spent about eight months in a New York sanatorium, losing the title role in Annie Get Your Gun while she was too ill to fight for it. She returned to London and rebuilt her career, starring in the review Starlight Roof at the London Hippodrome by the end of the decade. It was during that run that a photographer named Baron Nahum brought the Duke of Edinburgh backstage to meet her. Baron was a trusted court photographer who had shot the 1947 royal wedding and was also deeply connected to London’s bohemian circles.
He had founded the Thursday Club, an exclusive all-male lunch club in Soho where Prince Philip mixed with actors, artists, and naval men to escape court life. On that October evening, Baron led the prince through the back of the Hippodrome and knocked on Kirkwood’s door. The party that followed went to dinner at Les Ambassadeurs in Mayfair, then to the Milroy nightclub, where Kirkwood and Philip danced into the small hours. They had breakfast, reportedly scrambled eggs, before the night ended.
Princess Elizabeth was about eight months pregnant with Prince Charles, who was born on 14 November 1948. The gossip spread quickly, and King George VI was reported to be furious. The palace’s response was silence. No denial was ever issued, and Kirkwood was left to carry the rumor alone.
The press named her in every version of the story while protecting the prince, and her repeated denials only kept the story alive. The rumor cost her in ways she could never prove. She believed she was passed over for official honors that her career merited, and the whisper clung to her through four marriages and a pioneering television career. In 1954, she became the first woman to headline her own one-hour series on British television.
Noel Coward had written a role specifically for her in 1950’s Ace of Clubs. She married Jack Lisseter in 1940 and divorced him in 1950. In 1952, she married Greek shipowner Spiro Despero Gabriel, who died two years later. Her third marriage, to actor and writer Hubert Gregg in 1956, lasted on paper into the late 1970s but was unhappy.
In 1981, she married Peter Knight, a retired lawyer who took up her cause and helped her press the palace for vindication. In 1994, Kirkwood approached one of Prince Philip’s aides, Brian McGrath, and asked him to carry a message to the Queen. Philip responded in private correspondence, calling the affair story a mythology of the press and writing that invasion of privacy, invention, and false quotations were the bane of their existence. But he said nothing could be done short of starting libel proceedings.
Kirkwood wrote back that if there had been support from his direction, the matter could have been squashed years ago instead of her having to battle a sea of sharks single-handed. She wanted a public statement, not private sympathy, and she never got it. She said publicly: “A lady is not normally expected to defend her honor. It is the gentleman who should do that.
I would have had a happier and easier life if Prince Phillip, instead of coming uninvited to my dressing room, had gone home to his pregnant wife on the night in question. ”
Later in her life, Kirkwood sealed the private correspondence with Philip and left instructions through her will. The letters were to be shown to no one except the Duke of Edinburgh’s official biographer, and only after Philip himself was dead. She placed them in the keeping of writer and royal biographer Michael Thornton.
Because the letters could not embarrass Philip while he lived, no injunction could be justified, and the truth would wait until he was gone. Kirkwood died on Christmas Day 2007 in Ilkley, West Yorkshire, aged 86. She had been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. Peter Knight died in 2010.
Prince Philip died in April 2021 at the age of 99, and the condition she had written into her will was finally met. After his death, Thornton spoke publicly about the letters, describing them as written in terms of concerned friendship by two people caught up in a media maelstrom, and saying they did nothing to support the affair story. The letters proved that the two people at the center of the 50-year rumor had agreed between themselves that there was nothing to it.
Kirkwood had been denied a single public sentence of vindication in her lifetime, so she arranged to have the truth spoken on her own timetable, from beyond the grave, at the one moment when the silence could no longer be enforced.